Viking Advocates, LLC (LexBlog Germany)

No.  No, no no… NO. Stop believing key word results without thinking things through.  Just stop it. If you Google “Process Server Germany” a whole bunch of hits come back that would lead you to believe that you can simply hire a guy in Frankfurt or Munich or Berlin to walk up to a defendant...

I don’t have an FAQ page on this blog, but if I did, the very first question out of the gate would be “How do I cut that translation cost down from $50,000 to a more manageable figure?” It really is a shock to a litigator’s system– especially that of a patent litigator– when they’re...

Last week, I went on a bit of a rant— my thinking was sparked by a highly informative post by Dan Harris at the China Law Blog, in which he rebooted an older column in Four Essential Principles of Emerging Market Success.  His original (2004) commentary is even more prescient today as manufacturers and investors shift...

Here we go again.  I’ve written before in this space that, yes, counsel, you do have to translate that thing. But resistance keeps coming up in the legal community:  “oh, come on, the defendant lived in Chicago* for twelve years– the guy speaks English!” Perhaps, but he lives in Germany now, and you’re serving him...

An interesting Catch-22 sometimes faces U.S. lawyers when they try to serve a complaint with punitive damages on a German defendant. Germany’s public policy disdains punitive damages– indeed, until recently (that is, until the last couple of decades), they didn’t even conceptualize punitives in their legal thought process. But an increase in American litigation has...

I say all the time that we ain’t building rockets here.  But we are building an airship of sorts, and if you use the wrong kind of stuff to make it go up, bad things happen.  Do it the right way, and your journey is smooth.  Serving process in Germany is subject to the strictures of...

You’ve served the complaint on all of your defendants, they’ve entered their appearances, and everybody is girded up for battle.  Discovery commences.  In one of your depositions, you learn that one of the defendants was somehow selling a knock-off of your client’s product through a German distributor, and you are convinced that somewhere in that...